1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for autonomic scaling of virtual machines in a cloud computing environment.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
One of the areas of technology that has seen recent advancement is cloud computing. Cloud computing is increasingly recognized as a cost effective means of delivering information technology services through a virtual platform rather than hosting and operating the resources locally. Modern clouds with hundred or thousands of blade servers enable system administrators to build highly customized virtual machines to meet a huge variety of end user requirements. Many virtual machines, however, can reside on a single powerful blade server. Cloud computing has enabled customers to build virtualized servers on hardware over which they have absolutely no control. Deploying an application in a cloud computing environment simplifies the overall solution because the hardware becomes abstracted behind the cloud infrastructure. The end user, however, loses all control over the underlying hardware infrastructure including particularly a loss of control over scaling the number of virtual machines running an application. In a cloud environment scaling of an application is currently carried out manually by a system administrator—only when end users report performance degradation. This technique is slow and complex, and it inherently risks a user's experiencing a poor quality of service.